When reading popular questions I often will serial upvote comments, which leads to the appearance of the Red Comment Vote Threshold Dialog of Doom (RCVTDoD):

The problem

This dialog is infuriating, and for good reason. It's not helpful. It just stopped me from doing something I intend to do, and will do once the dialog gets out of my way. Worse yet, it doesn't even try to explain why it's there. It's just being a nuisance because some programmer has a vendetta against comment votes.

Ok, so that last bit wasn't exactly true, and I do actually understand why the dialog is there, but it doesn't change the fact that that dialog is broken.

Broken to the point that I'm considering tagging this as a bug instead of feature request.

Broken because it's now my job to think. I have to think about how long five seconds is, and then I have to wait, and I hate waiting.

So of course, I wait exactly 4.82 seconds and click the dialog again, and what happens? It comes back. It comes back and now I have to wait another five seconds.

The solution

I know we can't get rid of the five second delay, and I fully appreciate why that's a technical requirement. That doesn't mean we can't get rid of the dialog.

The correct path for least resistance on these comment votes is to prevent me from clicking too soon, without having wasted any of my precious clicks.

My first click was fine, so nothing there needs to change. The problem is that you allowed me to click prematurely (Yes, StackExchange, it's all your fault). Why would you do this? You're obviously keeping track of the five second delay already. How else would you know to send the RCVTDoD?

Instead, how about disabling the upvote buttons for the five second interval? Of course, this would be confusing when I try to upvote again, so if I'm hovering one of the upvote buttons, display a little animation so that I know how soon I'll be able to click again.

Concepts I've had are the upvote arrows filling up with color over the course of 5-6 seconds, or a simple CSS animated rotation transform. These would be relatively easy to implement, and if anyone were foolish enough to click on the animating arrow, you could still show the RCVTDoD, because if anyone's that impatient even after being told to wait and shown how long the wait is going to be, they deserve whatever comes to them.

The alternatives

I'd like to encourage suggestions as to how this could be improved, because I'm sure others have had run-ins with the RCVTDoD and might like a chance to vent their frustration improve StackExchange for the better.